The Hell of Good Intentions

From April 5-11,1968, 356 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. During the same week in 2004, 65 American soldiers were killed in simultaneous Shi’a and Sunni insurrections in Iraq. In February 1968, there were nearly 80 American deaths per day in Vietnam, compared to a maximum of 8 deaths per day during the last year in Iraq. All of which is to say that the problems in Iraq are still far from reaching the level of the Vietnam quagmire.

But to compare is not to equate. The differences between the two conflicts are numerous, but it is impossible not to find echoes of the Vietnam War in the present situation. The same odor of unilateralism. The same protests from foreign public opinion. The same original sin of exaggerating enemy actions to gain Congressional authorization for war (the undoubtedly imaginary Gulf of Tonkin aggression in Vietnam; the apparently imaginary possession of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). The same domino theory that postulated, in the first case, that the loss of South Vietnam to communism would cause a similar collapse among its neighbors, and, in the other, that the establishment of democracy in Iraq would unleash a wave of freedom throughout the region. The same logic of escalation whereby the appeal to reinforce American troops does not seem to be accompanied by progress in getting the “locals” to take charge of their own political and military affairs. The same notion that it’s necessary to destroy towns and villages in order to save them, or, to update that aphorism, that the population must be subjugated in order to be democratized.

Still more troubling is the familiar cocktail of optimism, good intentions, and ethnocentric blindness that characterized both interventions. As Stanley Hoffmann wrote during the Vietnam War (Gulliver’s Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy, 1968), “Americans, whose history is a success story, have been brought to believe that the values they have drawn from their own experience have a universal application. They refuse to accept that these values are linked to the specific conditions that made American success possible.” Hoffmann also highlights the fantasy of consensus and spontaneous harmony. Those conditions are considered so natural that “any obstacles to happiness are certainly due to a villain” (e.g. the Vietcong, the radical Shi’ite, the former Saddam partisans).

As a result of this endemic optimism, Americans never seem to accept that people may, as in Vietnam or in Iraq, make the wrong choices. They may prefer nationalism to democracy, sectarian chauvinism to real freedom. They may decide to attack the soldiers that arrived as liberators or to kidnap the NGO workers that are there to help them.

This pointless self-destructiveness deeply disturbs the American psyche. The war in Iraq, originally conceived as eminently moral, marks even more than September 11 the rediscovery of evil, of insoluble problems, and of the inescapable immorality of compromise solutions. In short, it reveals the peculiarly American incapacity, as Stanley Hoffman has also point out, to comprehend the limits of politics and the historical experience and complexity of foreign cultures.

This rediscovery could well manifest itself in the coming years as the end of the confidence, even hubris, that has recently characterized American foreign policy. That confidence, symbolized by the ascendance of the neoconservatives and their allies, stemmed from three sources: the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, the rapid economic growth of the 1990s, and the creation of a formidable military machine that began with the Reagan defense buildup. Together, these developments nourished an illusion of omnipotence.

A comparable bubble of confidence captures the American national mood at the beginning of the 1960s. The United States felt powerful as a result of its industrial prowess, it military and technological advances, and the economic recipes of Keynesianism. The federal government felt it could accomplish anything and everything: the promotion of civil rights, the eradication of poverty, the containment of Communism, the defense and development of South Vietnam. Vietnam burst that bubble.

Similarly, the Iraq intervention may well end up producing the reverse of what its advocates sought: an image of American weakness and irresolution that emboldens its enemies and a resurgence of the neo-isolationism that characterized the 1970s. The result would be a surge in terrorist recruitment; and yet greater difficulties for political reform in the Middle East.

One doesn’t get to choose the dominant power in the international system, and one influences it only rarely. France, a stakeholder in the world order that is guaranteed by the United States, criticized the Iraq intervention, as it did the Vietnam War. But France’s prescience, if such it proves to be, will not protect it from the consequences that would flow from an American defeat. The weakening of the dominant power’s hegemony would, as always, entail the strengthening of hostile regional powers, the resumption of arms races in trouble spots, and prolonged civil and regional chaos throughout the world. European integration and multilateral cooperation are but a partial response to these perils.

Thus, France must hope that Iraq, where its capacity to affect events is limited, will not be a new Vietnam. Optimally, the experience in Iraq will serve as a shot across the bow that alerts the United States to the necessity of cooperation and consultation. American society has natural counterweights to the extreme impulses of unilateralism and isolationism, but these take time to produce their effects.

In the meantime, France must support the Iraqi political transition process that France has long called for, particularly through its influence with countries in the region. France must also maintain a close relationship with a changing America. In so doing, it should confirm that French opposition to intervention in Iraq represented the friendly advice of an ally and was in no way the expression of a malevolence toward America. Such a stance would be contrary to France’s own long-term interests.